A Visionary Platform of Architecture

The Image as an Abstraction

Within both the Supreme Court and Swimming Pool proposals you isolate your proposal as to almost depict it as a floating island/model, what is the effect and purpose of this?

A model or an image must serve as an abstraction of the project. Its intent is to produce a clear argument. It has to be understood as a figure in a paper. Its purpose is to solely contain the information necessary to the sustaining of a particular argument. If context is not represented in a figure, the figure is not concerned with context. This is by no means an avoidance of the question of context in the project. It is simply not the question addressed in the figure, in this particular abstraction.

How important is context when representing a proposal?

It depends on which (aspect of the) proposal we address.

You frequently use the axonometric as a means of representation. To what extent do you agree with the notion that its is the most complete drawing tool?

To no extent. It is a trend. It comes and goes.

Whilst bold colours are used alongside the axonometric, black and white is reserved for more ‘technical drawings’ and you prefer a more textured approach when it comes to perspective views. How does this approach to each method of representation reflect a specific design/ drawing intent?

Again, every single image is an abstraction. Even a realistic rendering. It should only contain relevant information relating to the particular argument one is trying to make. A plan rarely contains more information than what can be expressed in pure black ink and a few line thicknesses. Color or the absence of color in a rendering will suggest naïveté or, for example, vain monumentality. The use of bold colors can be seen as a negative: nor black, nor pastel. There should always be a sort of economy of expression. One shouldn’t fetishize the image as an end.

With your 16 family competition in Marfa striking similarities appeared between your approach and that of Mies for the Neue Nationalgalerie. To what extent did you fully assert the resemblance?

To a full extent. Mies had solved every structural problem relating to lifting a great mass without saturating the ground floor with pillars, and we would reuse his strategy, simply using more modest materials and finishing.
Our intent is to focus primarily on social enhancement. The formal proximity to a modernist building is simply a testimony to our retreat from formal individuality.

Adrien Durrmeyer (1983), Martin Le Bourgeois (1984) and Max Turnheim (1982) are three architects living and working in Paris. Together, they lead the architecture studio UHO. They are actively participating in architectural education.